The streets in south Phillywere steaming with that glowing lick of a lingering mist that could condensate from one second to the other into a thick sudden pour. The brick seemed more like brick and therefore Philly looked more like Phillyeven though I’ve never been in it before. It was 11 in the morning and by the time we were ready to go out the condensation broke into the predictable rain of the day. With the guitar on my back and the day in front of us there was nothing else to do but to walk about until we found a nice morning pub where we could wait for the rain to calm down.

This was the story for about three more bars until we finally ended up in Old City at a nice neighborhood park. The day was humid and the sun was almost out from behind the clouds. This park was a nice gathering place for people reading the NY Times and the most recent Dalai Lama novel/essay. Musicians gathered there tuning their instruments with one another. There was a duo of accordion and guitar in the center, an acoustic guitarist sitting on a bench to the north, another just sort of jamming to himself. It certainly wasn’t the place I would have chosen to busk. It had a nice vibe and all but it was too harmonious for me to interrupt with my loud and angry folk songs and to make any money when musicians where just jamming for free around me. Gustavo thought otherwise and later confessed his choice to be a sort of experiment: throw me in the midst of an ultra comfortable setting and see if it worked. It didn’t. I had lots of fun just feeling Philly surrounding me and knowing, being aware of my being within such a nice context, another city, another adventure, but hey…again in my adventurously stupid way I had driven to Philadelphia with just enough cash for one way tolling. So I needed cash to get back out of the city and I only got 3 bucks. I don’t know if it was the fact that my seeding money was just a few coins or if the fact that I chose to ironically put my credit card along those coins in the guitar case made it a little difficult for the random transient to believe that I really needed their support.

Whatever it was I just did a quick set and decided to walk little bit more to find something more street-like. So Gustavo thought of the perfect place: South Street on south Philly. We headed there but we stopped for a few more pints of beer so that I could be in my element, the element of blatant uninhibited self-confidence. When we arrived at South St. it looked like the perfect place, full of traffic, tourists, bars, coffee shops and noise. We walked for a while looking for a nice spot to set up my case and myself and as we were walking a guy from inside a bar, through an opened window, called me.

– Sure, I’ll give you five bucks, but for that price I wanna hear “Free Bird”.

– Sorry no “Free Bird”, I suck at covers, but I do have some southwestern fried folk from Texas…that should make up for it…

– Ok sure just sing us something.

So I put my case in the floor, opened it, grabbed my guitar and strapped it and quickly began to sing one of my new songs. The vibe was great, they were drunk enough to throw in another five bucks just for the sake of it and people around them began throwing in 1’s. Not too many but a good 3 or 4 in the space of two songs. We were about a block and a half away from the Obama South Philly headquarters and so every time an Obama girl would pass by my patrons would shout for the candidate in a futile effort to get one of them to have a beer with them. It was beautiful. Coming to think of it I guess I should have stayed longer, at least a couple of songs longer but I was so excited that I decided to go look for a busking pitch right away. We did find one but I was only able to play a couple of songs before the cops told me to stop…It was a good day to celebrate my 20th busk.

Besides the strong winds in the area throughout spring that have kept me from busking in Juarez there is something else happening out there in the streets (and just yesterday at a specific street) that, well, has started to get to me somehow. I have for as long as I’ve lived in the region, specially in the northern side of the border, resisted the overreacting tendency of many El Pasoans to believe that Ciudad Juarez is a dangerous place. After all, the violence in the city does not come close to violence in other North American cities of the same size and the violence by which Juarez is now famous is almost completely targeted violence- as opposed to random widespread violence. Be it the horrible woman-murdering trend of the last decade or the drug related executions, the violence in Ciudad Juarez seems confined, maybe even self contained in a dark and hidden bubble with which the average resident of the region seldom has anything to do.

Sure, as resident of the area, we all have our anecdotes, we’ve all heard stories, we’ve all known someone who knows someone who may be inside that dark bubble, but 1.4 million people in the Juarez metropolitan area also wake up, go to work, school, parks, etc, ride back home, go to sleep and have a regular everyday life…so my reasoning has always been on the positive side when it comes to the situation across the border. But when an armed commando starts shooting the crap out of somebody with AK-47’s and shotguns in the middle of Juarez Avenue, three or four blocks up from my busking pitch…I can’t help but feel it. Specially when at least three bystanders are caught in the crossfire and killed. Two cab drivers, a cigarette vendor, three bicycle cops responding to the incident and of course at least one of the ones the commando was aiming for got their share of led.

Now I’d hate to be an alarmist but I also can’t deny that it has gotten to me. Here’s the note for you to read from El Paso Times:

A gunbattle on the Avenida Juárez tourist strip left two men dead and wounded five others, including three bicycle police officers, as part of a resurgence of violence in Juárez.The violence, possibly linked to a war between drug cartels and government forces across Mexico, continued Friday with a double homicide in the town of Palomas and an attempt on the life of a Juárez police commander and his bodyguards. In Juárez, there were five other separate homicides as of 8 p.m. Friday.

The Avenida Juárez incident occurred about 10 p.m. Thursday about two blocks from the foot of the Paso del Norte Bridge near shops, bars and nightclubs catering to tourists and partiers from the United States.

After the shooting, a man with a gunshot wound to the torso stumbled to get medical help on the U.S. side of the international bridge.

“We had a motorist advise us that there appeared to be a man who had been shot and collapsed about 10 yards inside the United States up toward the top of the bridge,” said Roger Maier, spokesman for U.S. Customs and Border Protection.

The bridge was temporarily closed. An ambulance took the wounded man to Thomason Hospital.

Chihuahua state police identified the men killed on Avenida Juárez as German Padilla Zavala, 27, and Oscar Luis Zapien Carbajal, 47.

Juárez news media reported that the men might have been among the parking attendants and cigarette vendors working in the area and were killed during a kidnapping attempt of another person that went wrong.

Police officials said the bicycle officers were responding to a fight and the sound of gunshots when they came under fire. Pablo Lozoya, Felipe Martinez Peralta and Mercedes Medina Ortega were in stable condition Friday morning at a Juárez hospital.

Police also said a 78-year-old man, who was sitting with his family in the back seat of a car, was grazed by several shots that struck the vehicle. Investigators found more than 35 bullets casings at the scene.

The Avenida Juarez shooting was the second in a Juárez tourist section in less than a day. Early Thursday, four El Pasoans were wounded outside the Arriba Chihuahua nightclub in the ProNaF zone near the Bridge of the Americas.

“The El Paso Convention and Visitors Bureau understands the recent events in neighboring Juárez are unsettling for some. However, it is important to note that historically there has been virtually no crime committed against tourists to El Paso or the city of Juárez,” bureau spokesman Pifas Silva said in a statement.

“It is, however, best if visitors to international cities follow a few specific guidelines: travel during daylight hours, travel with groups of two or more, frequent popular tourism attractions only, respect the laws of other countries and always carry proper identification at all times,” Silva said.

Friday morning, Juárez police commander Jose Roberto Ortiz Enriquez, who heads the Barbicora station, and two bodyguards survived an attack while riding in a patrol truck that was intercepted by shooters in a pickup, causing the bullet-riddled police vehicle to crash into a traffic-light pole, police officials said. The three were hospitalized in stable condition.

Friday afternoon, a father and son were killed in a hail of 67 bullets along a street in Palomas, across the border from Columbus, N.M., Chihuahua state police said.

Arnoldo Carreon Renteria, 57, and his son Damian Arnoldo Carreon, 25, were while getting into their pickup, with New Mexico plates, when they were shot.

Luna County Sheriff Raymond Cobos said that the men were believed to be Palomas residents and that his deputies were on alert to make sure violence did not spill over into the U.S.

Mob-style street ambushes and executions had initially declined in the region with the arrival in March of more than 2,000 Mexican army soldiers and federal police officers to Juárez and other communities in Chihuahua.

Juárez Mayor Jose Reyes Ferriz on Friday asked that federal and military forces do more and change strategies to stop the bloodshed, which is linked to a war across Mexico between government forces and drug-trafficking groups.

“To us, it appears evident that organized crime has learned the routine of the army. Its regular patrol routes, the hours it patrols and has designed strategies to evade” military operations, Reyes Ferriz said in a statement.

Since the start of the year, there have been more than 250 murders in Juárez, including the slayings of about 15 law enforcement officers.

I haven’t actually busked these past days, busy holiday schedules from the corporate side of the anti-cruisers have kept me from the streets, but today something interesting happened. I had some business to attend in downtown El Paso and as I was forming a line I recognized the gentleman in front of me.

He came and talked to me the first day I busked at the Museum pitch. When he first approached me I thought that he wasn’t all there, but as we spoke he struck me as an extremely lucid person only a little weird, but aren’t we all? He spoke four languages perfectly and a little french. That time he told me all about his home town in Jalisco. I happen to have been to that little town more than three times in my hitch hiking adventures, so we got to talk and he showed me some pictures and stuff. Anyway, I never saw him again until today, in front of me in this line. So I just told him: “You came from Lagos de Moreno, Jalisco, right?” And he seemed taken aback, so he remained silent and then turned and said: “When did I mentioned that?” I told him how we had met in Juarez and stuff and he recalled the occasion. He didn’t say much though, it was his turn at the window and he went about his business. When he was done he just said good luck and took off. As I was talking to the lady at the window he approached me and asked: “Are you still playing there?” I told him that I still did at least twice a week, so he reached into his pocket and told me: “Here’s a little tip for next time.” He gave me 75 cents. It was the last tip of the year, or the first of the new one? Since it was given to me as a tip for next time I play and the next time will be next year… I’ll have to ask him next time I see him.

I had the day off and thought it would be a good idea to go busking before the whole navidad thing started. I went straight to the Velarde area an did a quick set there in stern defiance against the speakers, and then just went to my regular spot. There was a lot of people but everybody was just too busy. A couple of kids did stop and listen to me and then asked “so, whose songs do you know?” I routinely answered them: “Mine.” They weren’t that impressed.

When I finished I took my time walking on Juarez avenue looking for a good exchange rate but ended up in the same currency exchange place. The ladies there are nice and never make faces when I show up with all of those coins. Anyway, before that I stopped to talk for a little while with Don Alacran. I asked him about his business and he said it wasn’t going very well, that usually by this time of the month he had almost none of his figurines left but that this year had been terrible. As we talked about the cold weather he started to tell me about previous Christmas eves he had had. He told me how 5 years ago in a freezing and snowing Christmas eve a couple of nuns came to him and gave him ten dollars so that he could go home. He said he couldn’t even work on his figurines that day because of the cold, so he was just standing there waiting to sell something to bring dinner home. He then told me about last year’s Christmas too. A stranger came to him and told him to come with him. He then took Don Alacran to a supermarket and bought lots of food for him. He remembered how he couldn’t even carry all of that stuff and how the generous gentleman also offered a ride home but he couldn’t accept it because it would be too much. He was deeply moved.

As he was telling me this he was also saying how this Christmas eve he was just waiting long enough to sell something so that he could buy a kilo of tortillas and have some dinner. At this point I felt like asking him about his personal life, whether or not he had a family, but I thought it was too early for me to ask anything like that and instead I just asked where he lived. He told me. After spending something like ten minutes with him I decided to buy a beautiful little turtle from him. The turtles and the alacranes are a dollar, the amazing butterflies are $2.50.

There is at least one other guy that does the same kind of figurines but he seems less approachable even in the aesthetics of his craft. While Don Alacran makes beautiful butterflies this other guy makes menacing cobras and attack positioned dragons. They are also quite amazing and a lot bigger than Don Alacran’s but the colours and the subject matter aren’t as welcoming. Anyway, he was really happy that I bought the turtle from him and he told me that if business was better he would have given it for free, I told him not to worry, that I wouldn’t have accepted it for free, that’s his job and his prices are less than fair. Don Alacran’s name is Amado by the way (Loved in Spanish). I hope he really is.

I then walked further downtown to get a public transportation bus to take me to the east side of town, cross the border back to the United States on that side and go to a family dinner. I kept Don Alacran in mind. Maybe we can do something for him, like sell and ship his figurines with the help of the Internet. Otherwise stop by and say hi to him, buy something from him if you happen to be on Juarez avenue. He’d be the one with the cowboy hat and a dozen or so little wire insects in front of him.

Day 15

Monday

Amount of money made (BC subtracted): $9.58

Time Played: 1h 50min

Little wire turtle: $1

Public transportation: .45c

Actual gain: $8.13

Currency exchange rate: 11.00 pesos/dollar

Knowing that Don Amado was only having tortillas that night: heartbraking, eye opening, priceless.

I decided to do the same thing again, a quick stop at that open shopping area next to the market, with the cantinas and the vecindad-looking brothel at La Paz street and then go to the front of the shoe stores around the corner on Velarde Street, a very famous downtown shopping street if you were raised in Juarez, and then end up at the Museum area, right at the corner of Juarez Avenue and 16 of September. As I walked south on Juarez avenue I said good morning to Don Alacran who responded with an unexpectedly enthusiastic “Buena suerte!” (Good Luck) which made me feel really confident.

I thought that the first place was a good busking place because of the attention one gets but I realized that the money isn’t that good. I never count what’s in my hat until I get to the money exchange store but I could easily discern a small amount after I did my set. I do an 8-10 song set depending on the noise and the vibe, and it amounts to almost 40 minutes of music. Doing three different spots puts me at two hours of actual playing which can be kind of exhausting if I don’t take breaks. So I think that that first set I do at La Paz street could be better spent either at a different busking pitch or at any of the two other ones.

After this I went to the Velarde pedestrian alley and played my set without any particularities. The money and the people there make the other spot look futile. I place my tripod and myself right next to the inner side of a street bench, so there is a space between me and the businesses behind me. The owner of the very small shoe store behind me now says hi in a very respectful and distant way, but always with a smirk of approval which makes me feel welcomed there. This is the only place where I have managed to pick up a crowd, even if small, of on lookers. It still makes me nervous but I try to focus on my guitar. I usually get great comments and a sort of curiosity about my songs. “Who’s song is that?”- “Mine…”-”Wow…really?”

When I finished my set I was walking north towards the Museum when I saw Ulises talking to some young people. He had his guitar with him again. I stopped to say hi to him and he told me that he had been at the Museum looking for me. I told him that I had followed part of his advice and ventured deeper into the downtown area. He asked me if I was going towards the museum and he invited himself too before I could answer. As we walked a few steps he approached a bench where a lady was sitting. She had ear muffs and a scarf and gloves and a thick jacket on her. Ulises just went to her and told her “Let’s go”. She looked confused and he explained to her that I was a friend from El Paso, that I played at the museum and that he was going to join me for a while. He introduced her as his wife, from Veracruz, on the opposite coast of Acapulco, where he is from. That explained the astronaut approach to the weather, I guess. So we walked and talked a little about the busking business and how he just came from busking at the bus system and made six dollars in just about four trips. When we got the museum he started playing some songs and then I played a couple of mine but I realized that he’s not that great of a partner forbusiness. I cannot accompany him because I don’t have the musical ability and he cannot accompany me because he refuses to tune his guitar with mine. His answer: “if we all tried to tune to somebody else’s instrument nobody would be doing anything”. I ‘m not sure I follow his logic, or if there is logic to follow at all in his statement, but I wasn’t going to argue with him about how I tune to a Wurlitzer organ. The other thing is that he doesn’t seem to finish up the songs, it is like he is just teaching me, so it wasn’t really working right. People passing by thought we were just jammin’ for no apparent reason. In the mean time his wife was walking around, because he told her to “go explore” . When she took off he turned to me and he said that she’s was like an idle cat that needed to wonder off in search of warmth. After a few minutes it got too cold for him because of the shade and he decided to go so he said bye and went away to work somewhere else. I was relived to a certain extent, he’s a great guy but I rather busk alone.

As soon as he was gone I started a set but my fingers were so cold that there were certain songs I couldn’t do, so I just stuck to the fast ones. It was a good day at the end, I even received an envelope with some dollar bills plus a catholic prayer icon of some sort. I guess it was a part of some body’s charity strategy for December. You might notice the change of hat from the pictures, this is a Russian winter hat that I bought in Moscow, slightly over suited for our winters, but useful nonetheless. On my way north on Juarez avenue I saw the brother/sister duo of accordion and cup, I said hi and wished them luck. The girl smiled.

Today I met Ulises who is ,ironically, more of a siren than a travelling god, although one could argue that he was both simultaneously if one saw him busking on a public transportation bus. He just stopped by and started to play with me to later take over the show in a very friendly way. He came by with his guitar and as we talked and played he explained to me that he only does the guitar thing on his free days because he loves music, but that his real job and real passion is clowning and making balloon figurines. He works a little bit further in the downtown area. He explained to me that there are better spots to busk at, full of local traffic, and he also told me that I should try the public transportation. As he talked he also played many songs. He has an amazing repertoire of Mexican folk music and all other kinds of music, from Italian pop to Mexican rock to norteño stuff.

Ulises doesn’t make his own songs and was really pleased to listen to mine. So we both exchanged a little knowledge, from busker to busker. As he explained to me some chords for Mexican music and I explained him about loosing the fear to write he kept on playing and I kept on playing so I didn’t really stopped working. The great thing about Ulises is that he was really proud about being a very good clown and a very good balloon artist, and he really was able to transmit, convey, his vibe about the whole business even without his clown suit or his balloons, but with the guitar. You couldn’t walk past Ulises without taking a little part of him with you, such as when your left shoe accidentally manages to step on a freshly tossed piece of chewing gum that has been under the sun for a few minutes. I can only imagine him as a clown with part of his smile shining out those metal teeth for the whole world to see, or at least the whole downtown plaza (he had 3 silver ones). It was a pleasure to meet a real downtown busker for once.

Today as I walked towards my spot I saw the guy that makes the little scorpions out of wire cleaning some windows at the main strip in downtown Juarez. I guess it was an extra gig for him, I said hi and he returned the greeting. He’s about the only one that I’ve gotten to know in this area and when I talked to him he told me a few things about the main strip that corroborated my gut feeling. Ever since I started playing in downtown Juarez I’ve thought about playing in this street because there is a lot of traffic and many tourist walk through it, yet it has a very dirty vibe to it that just doesn’t make me feel welcomed. It’s not dirty like in kinky dirty but actually just dirty, dusty and not only does it have many people asking for money but apparently they have a bad attitude about it too according to Mr. Alacran. So, even though I’ve been thinking about changing my spot, I think I’m gonna stick with it for a while. It happens to be right outside a museum, there aren’t any people asking for money there and I get to see more of the local dynamic towards buskers. Since I have started playing I informed myself of many busking tips and tricks yet I was a little skeptical about how they would work in a northern Mexican context. One of the tips that I read about was about trying to look neater in appearance than the people asking for money and of course it makes absolute sense, but then I thought about the fact that people in this region seem to think that if you look in good shape you don’t need the help. And I know it sounds funny from me to say help, but I think that many people view their tip as that, as help, not as a nice tip for a nice artsy colour in their usually gloomy day, but as a charitable help. Even if such was the case I wasn’t about to start exploiting a run-down image just for the sake of it either, but I do wear some torn jeans from time to time and even a neglected beard because that’s just the way I dress and keep myself. Anyway, for the sake of experimentation I’ve stopped wearing torn jeans when I’m going to play and it seems like it is working. It has only increased by three or four dollars but it seems awfully coincidental that it has increased exactly the days that I haven’t worn those jeans, so I’m attributing the rise to my pants and my preppy sweater! Today I also got invited to join a band as a vocalist by three 16/17 years old kids, they even played me a song of theirs and gave me a CD for me to see if maybe I would be interested…I think I’ll pass this time.